Rejecting oppositional binarizations of home and away, To Be In and Out of the World illustrates a visual politic of ‘post’-colonial dispossession through a triangulation of Hong Kong/China, Palestine/Israel, and South Africa through the works of Tiffany Sia, Ahlam Shibli, and Nolan Oswald Dennis, respectively.
The exhibition is conceptually figured through Dennis’ diagrammatic ‘black consciousness of space’: an imaginative spatialization of statecraft, memory, and the metaphysics of land. Shibli’s contrast of the instability of existence inside and outside of state recognition holds the conditionally bureaucratically legible guest worker in Germany against the socially dead Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. Sia’s challenge of the visual insistences of legibility engages the tenuousness of one’s narrative reliability and/against the omnipotence of state historicity — her geopoetic of ‘no place’ is realized through the gaze of a child.